


how should we dream of this place without us?

by HelixDoubleHelix



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen, Survival, Zombie Apocalypse, formal apology to all the characters who are dead as hell in this, the t rating might be excessive but better safe than sorry, this came to me in a haze after reading a zombie book
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:22:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27516019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelixDoubleHelix/pseuds/HelixDoubleHelix
Summary: Declan and Matthew had gone with Ronan to pick up Adam from Harvard for his spring break. The first reports of infections on the eastern seaboard would have come about two hours after they left.Ronan came back two weeks later, alone. He won’t tell anyone what happened to his brothers, and none of them want to ask.Zombies!
Relationships: Blue Sargent & Maura Sargent, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch & Blue Sargent
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	how should we dream of this place without us?

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Advice to a Prophet_ by Richard Wilbur.
> 
> Warnings for...gore? I guess? It's pretty mild. Standard zombie stuff. Also death. Also Ronan being sad and missing Adam, if that pains you.

Ronan’s screaming again.

The best spot on the roof to keep watch from is directly over his room, so Blue and Gansey can hear him clearly. It’s a common enough occurrence that neither of them move, though Blue can see that Gansey wants to. She understands. He’s Gansey, and that means he’ll always want to help Ronan Lynch. There’s just nothing he can do in this scenario.

She slides the gun off his lap. “He’s okay.” 

Gansey nods miserably. Blue squeezes his hand, but he doesn’t squeeze back.

It’s hard on him, she knows. On all of them, obviously, but Gansey especially--he’s too kind, and he feels too much. Hearing his best friend have screaming nightmares every other night is doing a serious number on him.

The rest of them are quieter. Gansey’s nightmares are completely silent until he wakes up gasping. Henry cries. Opal makes little snuffling sounds. Maura claims she doesn’t have any, but sometimes when she thinks Blue’s asleep she’ll poke her head into the room, like she’s checking that her daughter’s still there. 

Blue’s nightmares are almost always about before all of this, even though there’s plenty more to terrify her now. She dreams of Gansey dying in her arms on the side of the road, of her mother trapped in a cave, of Gwenllian’s ceaseless singing. Neeve’s laughter. Persephone with all the life gone out of her.

It’s not so bad for Blue, because Gansey’s right there and she can just roll over and wrap herself around him until her breathing is back to normal. But Ronan sleeps alone. He locks himself in his room at night, afraid to dream some new horror upon the rest of them. When he wakes up, there’s no one to calm him down. He screams until he remembers where he is, and that can take a long time.

Below them, in Ronan’s room, the screaming goes on. Down on the street, crowds of the dead are moaning, attracted to the sound. Next to Blue, Gansey starts to cry. 

<>

It’s been seven months since the infection first swept the country, killing almost everyone and locking the few who survived into their homes. Blue doesn't know how many others are alive in Henrietta, other than the six of them (plus a half, for Chainsaw). She does know they’re incredibly lucky. Most of the people they love are gone. 

Declan and Matthew had gone with Ronan to pick up Adam from Harvard for his spring break, Matthew citing brotherly bonding and Ronan citing a refusal to drive for eight straight hours. The first reports of infections on the eastern seaboard would have come about two hours after they left, when they were somewhere in Maryland. 

Ronan came back nearly two weeks later, alone. He won’t tell anyone what happened to his brothers, and none of them want to ask.

Adam got a text through to Gansey, just before they lost cell reception— _am ok stay where u are_ —so they know he’s safe in Cambridge, in theory. It’s not enough for Ronan, who wants to disregard Adam’s instructions and take off for Massachusetts, but Blue holds onto that text like a prayer. 

“He’s okay,” she tells Gansey on his bad days, when everything is too much for him and all he can do is curl up under the covers while she holds his hand. “Does Adam Parrish seem like someone who dies?” 

“No perishing for Parrish,” jokes Henry. It’s not funny, but Blue laughs anyway, and even Gansey smiles a little. Henry’s sense of humor is kind of all they have left, at this point. 

Henry hasn’t heard from any of his family or friends. One of the shambling bodies he and Blue passed in their mad sprint to Monmouth looked an awful lot like Cheng2, but he didn’t see it and Blue will never tell him. She doesn’t think he’d survive it.

There’s a lot of things they don’t tell each other, these days, from fear of breaking apart. The weight of their silence is painful.

Maura has always hated a quiet house. When she and Blue are on watch together, sitting on the roof, they’ll try to play word games, but those never last very long. All of the games they know were played at 300 Fox Way for years. Memories will surface inevitably, and one of them will say “Orla always–” or “Remember when Calla–”

And then they both go quiet and still and turn away from each other, because Maura gutted a zombified Orla with a kitchen knife and no one knows what happened to Calla, and they don’t talk about that, either.

Some things are better left alone.

<>

As far as places to spend the zombie apocalypse go, Monmouth is probably one of the best around. It’s not as if Blue doesn’t miss 300 Fox Way and her own room, but she has never been anything but realistic, and she knows that if she and Henry hadn’t made it here, they would be dead. Monmouth is secure, easily defendable, located in the center of town.

It’s easy, when Blue’s not thinking about it, to feel safe. When she’s reading on the couch, or playing poker with Ronan, who loses every time, she can pretend she’s a normal girl in a normal world. She can pretend that outside their walls Henrietta is as slow and alive as it’s always been, that she has a shift at Nino’s after this, that she’s just here to visit her boyfriend. And then whoever’s on watch will shout a warning, and she’ll take the axe from its place by the fridge and go kill the zombie skulking at the door.

Blue has never been someone who lived in a normal world.

They develop a routine, because Maura says they should; they have a chart for chores and watch shifts and scavenging trips up by the door. Gansey washes clothes every Thursday, Henry hangs, and Blue sorts. Every afternoon someone sits down with Opal and tries to explain elementary-level math (which mostly means keeping her from eating the paper and pencils). Henry says it feels a bit like living at school again. Blue wouldn’t know.

They adapt. The fridge is shelving space now, holding boxes of Ronan’s dreamt ammo. (Blue asked him once, joking, if he could dream up a cure for the infection, and Ronan’s shoulders slumped as he said, “I’ve already tried.”) They collect rainwater and boil it to drink and bathe. The local foxes, rats, and dogs have been eating well with all the dead bodies lying around, so those are the animals they shoot and cook. There’s a vegetable garden on the roof, though the results have been poor so far since they didn’t start planting until May. 

Blue likes growing their food. She likes the way the dirt squishes between her bare toes, and the way the plants stretch towards the sun. She likes hunting, too, taking survival into her own hands, eating something she caught herself. This new world, simplified and self-sufficient, isn’t a bad place to be. Sometimes she thinks about the girl from a million years ago who wanted to save trees and study pygmy tyrants, and it hurts, but that never lasts very long.

<>

“Do you think we’re murderers now?” Henry asks out of nowhere as they raid Aglionby’s cafeteria.

Blue adjusts the bandanna over her mouth; the fridges haven’t worked in months and all the perishable items stink something awful. “What do you mean?”

“The zombies. I know they’re sort of already dead, but do you think we’re bad people?”

“No,” says Blue, because the most important thing in a zombie apocalypse is that you can’t think about it.

Because every zombie they kill was a real person once, with a real unrotted face and real people they loved and real hobbies that weren’t trying to bite others. Henrietta is a small town; Blue knows most of the people they bury, from school or work or dog-walking. She knows that Tim Holiday broke his arm in fifth grade and that Miss Preston grows roses, and she shoots them all just the same when they come near Monmouth.

The truth is Blue doesn’t know if they’re murderers now, and she doesn’t care. There is no room for morality here. If it will keep her family safe, Blue will cut down a thousand zombies, anything that tries to hurt them. She has always done what needs to be done, slitting open Adam’s skin to let a demon out of his body, kissing Gansey to stop his heart.

She had been sorry for those things, back then. She’s not sorry now.

<>

Opal whispers, one morning before anyone else is awake, “do you think it will ever be fixed?”

Her voice is ancient, but she sounds very young.

“I don’t know,” Blue says honestly. “We’ll just have to live and find out.”

<>

If anything is simple now, it’s being with Gansey. They take care of each other, talking each other down from panic attacks and nightmares, learning how to live in this new world. Gansey teaches her to shoot, because rich white families love guns for some reason. Blue teaches him to sew patches when his shirts rip, because apparently he used to just buy a new one (she wishes desperately that Adam were here, to roll his eyes and say _fucking rich people)._

They have sex for the first time while Maura and Ronan take potshots at zombies from the roof. It’s nothing like she thought it would be, much slower with a lot of giggling and elbows in ribs, but it’s nice all the same. 

Afterwards, while Gansey wonders aloud why there were so few condoms left at the pharmacy, Blue thinks about how simple it is, now, to be together, without the guarantee of more time. No worries about hiding or being clingy or awkwardness, not with everything else going on. Just two people, skin against skin. Just Dick and Jane, moving in the dark.

“I love you,” she says out loud, interrupting Gansey. 

He holds her tighter. “I love you, too."

That’s all there is.

<>

Ronan says, “I want to go find Adam.”

“No,” Maura responds immediately.

“I wasn’t asking.” 

“Neither was I.” Maura sets down her knitting and looks directly at him. “It’s October. It’s already snowing up north. We’d freeze to death, and do you really think you can outrun a zombie in a foot of snow? We get tired. They don’t.”

At the table, Blue watches out of the corner of her eye. Opal keeps writing her multiplication tables. All her 3’s are backward, but Blue isn’t too worried about it.

Maura’s right, of course, just like she was right in spring, when they had no idea what was out there or what the zombies were capable of yet, and in summer, when the heat would make walking hell and running impossible. She’s right, and Ronan knows it.

But Ronan is so much _less_ without Adam, meaner and exhausted and not eating enough. He carries Opal around, trades insults with Blue and helps Gansey with his model Henrietta, but his eyes are blank and far away. Blue imagines what she would do if it was Gansey who was lost somewhere across state lines, and feels sick.

“We can go this spring,” says Maura. “The second the snow on the mountains starts melting, we’ll go.” Her face softens. “We all miss him too, kid.”

 _Not like this,_ Blue wants to say. Ronan leaves the room, fists clenched. Chainsaw flies after him.

“Kerah?” Opal says softly. She stands to chase him. Blue takes her arm.

“Give him some alone time,” she says. “Come on. We can work on multiplication and you can show him what you learned.”

Opal sits back down and picks up her pencil again. Blue looks at her little face, screwed up in concentration, at her backwards but painstakingly written 3’s, and thinks, _Adam, you’d be so proud of her. Please be alive._

<>

When winter comes, none of them are ready for it. Virginia winters are far from brutal, but so many of the comforts they used to take for granted are nonexistent now. There’s no canned chicken soup, no stores to duck into to get out of the freezing rain. No electricity means no central heating, and Monmouth is freezing, all cold steel and big drafty windows that they have to plug up with rags. Maura uses up the last bits of yarn knitting socks. Henry teaches Opal to wear a blanket like a cape. 

Opal starts sleeping in Maura’s bed for body heat, after an argument with Ronan involving a lot of Latin curses and hoof-stomping. He won’t let her in his room, still afraid to dream something deadly.

 _“Ego sum somnium!”_ Opal yells. “Dreams can’t kill dreams!” Chainsaw screeches in what might be agreement.

“That’s not even a little bit how it works,” says Ronan, and he picks her up by her armpits and tosses her into Maura’s room, ending the conversation.

Henry moves in with Gansey and Blue. Blue minds less than she thought she would. He has cold toes, but the extra body does help. They rotate who gets to be in the middle, and with someone on either side of her she’s practically lukewarm.

“I’ve never been in a bed with three people before,” Gansey says thoughtfully one night in December. “It’s rather fun. Like a big, grown-up sleepover.”

“Pump the brakes, casanova,” says Blue, her voice muffled into Henry’s shoulder. Gansey splutters. Henry just laughs.

Ronan, alone in his room, must be freezing. But he snaps every time they suggest he sleep with someone else, so eventually everybody stops bringing it up.

<>

Sometime around Christmas, according to the calendar that Gansey keeps, it becomes clear that they don’t have enough food stored up. Five fully grown people and one goat-human hybrid eat more than any of them would have expected. Starving sounds like a shitty way to die, so Blue and her mother take their weapons and a cart from the grocery store and go on another scavenging trip.

They have to work their way out towards Fox Way, because all the buildings near Monmouth have already been picked clean. Blue feels strange being back in her own neighborhood, standing in Mr. Merrick’s kitchen as if it’s a year ago and she’s come to walk his dog. The only difference is that she’s taking all his canned food and granola bars, she kills three zombies skulking in his yard, and the dog’s body is decomposing in the living room.

The trip is a success, at first. Miss Preston’s house has ginger snaps that are only mildly stale. Maura finds the potatoes growing in her backyard. The Holidays had five kids, so their pantry has more cereal than anyone’s should. They’re in high spirits as they turn to go back to Monmouth, and that’s when everything goes wrong.

Less than a block from safety, four zombies emerge from somewhere behind them. Blue kills three of them.

The fourth one used to be the Grey Man, and he bites Maura’s neck in the seconds before she cuts his heart out.

Blue screams. 

“Did it break the skin?” Maura asks hoarsely. “Check.”

Blue checks, pulling her mother’s collar aside. 

Blood smears across her fingers.

<>

It takes hours for her to turn, sweating and shivering. They lay her on the floor, with a pillow and a blanket. Henry and Gansey take Opal to Ronan’s room to draw and eat pencils. She doesn’t need to see this.

Around one in the morning Maura starts crying blood and breathing death, and tells Ronan, "you know what to do."

“Mom,” Blue whispers. 

“I won’t hurt you,” Maura says firmly, through her rattling gasps. “You keep yourself and your boys safe.”

“Mom, _please_.”

Ronan’s got the shotgun in his hands, aimed, the safety off. He looks sick. “Blue...”

“Don’t shoot,” Blue screams at him, “Ronan don’t shoot, if you shoot I will _never_ forgive you, don’t do it, please, _please,_ Ronan, don’t _–“_

“It’s all for you, baby girl,” says Maura, so much love in her eyes, and when the shotgun goes off and the light leaves them a little bit of Blue dies too.

<>

In the morning, they bury her out back, struggling to dig into the frozen ground. They don’t leave flowers, because there aren't any left.

“I love you,” Blue whispers. Gansey’s hand is cold in hers. Henry stands guard. Opal is crying.

They go back inside and sit in silence and Blue doesn’t feel anything at all. 

<>

The pillow Maura died on is splattered with blood and brain. 

She sets it on fire.

<>

Blue manages to avoid Ronan for two days, which is an impressive feat given that they live in the same house. He finds her on the third day, curled up in the bathtub, and climbs in across from her.

“Get out,” says Blue.

He doesn’t, just keeps staring at his feet. His socks are bright yellow. Maura made them.

“Get out,” Blue says again, and starts crying. “Get out, get the fuck out, you killed my mom, you bastard!”

When he still doesn’t move, she punches him in the chest—once, and then again when he doesn’t try to block her. She hits him how the Grey Man taught her, thumb outside, from the shoulder, and that makes her cry harder, because the Grey Man bit her mother and now he’s gone too. “You killed her,” she hiccups, punching Ronan as hard as she can. 

Ronan takes the hits until she runs out of steam, and then he leans his long body forward and wraps his arms around her. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry, Blue.”

Blue wails into his jacket, knowing she’s not just crying about Maura, but everyone else, too. She’s crying about Orla and Matthew and Declan and Cheng2, who are dead, and about Adam and Calla and so many others, who are dead or alive but lost either way, and it’s all just so horrible, all the death and sickness everywhere, everyone hurting, everyone alone, and now her mother is gone and she can’t bring her back.

“I hate you,” Blue sobs against Ronan’s chest, “I hate you, I hate you,” and Ronan just holds her tighter and says “I know. It’s okay.”

They stay there, wrapped around each other in the bathtub, for a long time.

<>

The food they brought home is enough to get them through winter, carefully rationed. No one complains about being hungry, not even Opal. Everybody’s hungry. There’s no point talking about it. 

There’s a sick sort of satisfaction, seeing the Aglionby boys want for food for the first time in their lives. Blue isn’t proud of it, and she pushes it down as she shows them how to chew gum to suppress their appetites, how to slice things so it seems like there’s more, but the feeling’s there all the same. 

On watch, Blue sits in silence. If it’s Henry with her, he’ll keep up a running stream of conversation, but he won’t expect her to reply. Gansey kisses her forehead and rubs her frozen hands between his. Ronan doesn’t say anything, just drapes another blanket over her shoulders no matter how many are already there. Blue loves them all so much it hurts, sometimes.

There are less zombies around, as time goes on. Henrietta is small, isolated. They have to run out of people eventually.

Blue eats another stale gingersnap and hopes that wherever the dead go, it’s less empty.

<>

Chainsaw flies off to catch mice. She doesn’t come back.

<>

The snow on the mountains starts melting in March. Ronan says, “time to leave.”

So they leave. They shoulder backpacks filled with water, the last of the food, socks, ammo, a dreamt sleeping bag for each of them. They pick out new guns from the store near the elementary school. Opal brings her tattered math workbook. They lock Monmouth’s door behind them and march to the edge of town.

The road out of Henrietta stretches before them, endless and unknown. 

“Excelsior,” says Gansey, and off they go.

**Author's Note:**

> Opal's Latin should translate to something like "I am a dream," according to the three different online dictionaries I used. Classics majors and Latin students, please don't yell at me.
> 
> My tumblr is @buteojamicensis. Come say hi!


End file.
